Massive Increase In Data Loss During Recession

The recession is having a serious impact on the integrity of data, after a data recovery specialist noted a massive rise in data loss incidents since the recession began.

Kroll Ontrack says that it has witnessed a 100 percent increase in demand for critical application data recoveries for businesses. This, it says, mirrors the last recession, and it seems that the surge is being blamed on cost cutting excerises, such as shrinking IT departments and budgets. The result, says Kroll, is that companies are cutting corners and human error is causing prolific data loss.

And rather worryingly, it seems that essential IT applications such as relational databases and systems that manage email are among those experiencing data corruption.

“We are not talking about a specific rise in data recovery requests per say but a massive rise emergency business data recovery,” said Phil Bridge, managing director at Kroll Ontrack, speaking to eWEEK Europe. “This is where data recovery is needed in 24 hours, and is generally related to business critical systems such as databases and email accounts.”

“We have actually seen more than a 100 percent rise over last 12 months,” he said. “It is the data loss scenario which are absolutely crippling for a business. These are cases where you expect to see several layers of security, but that security is being eroded, and the major reasons it seems are reductions in IT staff, cuts in staff training, and cutting corners which results in what we see as preventable issues.”

This, according to Kroll’s chief data recovery engineer Robert Winter, mirrors the same trend in the last major recession back in 1997.

“One of our biggest data recovery efforts was with a company with primary and secondary sites that ran replication software,” said Winter. “A maintenance person accidentally deleted a data volume from the primary site, but had forgotten to turn off the replication.”

Bridge told eWEEK Europe that this happened at an overseas global bank, “not a small company, and was a result of a lack of training, with IT personnel with more workload on their shoulders, which resulted in more mistakes and failure under pressure, resulting in the need for disaster recovery.”

Bridge and Winter also warned that the introduction of virtual drives and virtualisation in general is resulting in silly mistakes, such as IT personnel accidentally deleting a virtual machine and finding that they don’t have backups of those containers.